Zachary Palmer

User Name/Nick: Conwaaaaaay! Hello.
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AIM/IM: stoptheworld26
E-mail: michael heroin at gmail dot com
Other Characters: Horatio Hornblower

Character Name: Zachary Palmer
Series: The Rivers of London Books
Age: Difficult to say, but probably mid twenties. Maybe.
From When?: At the end of Broken Homes, Zach was crashing in a housing block which was blown up by an evil wizard. In the book, he wasn't in there when it got blown up. FOR THE PURPOSES OF THE BARGE, THOUGH... he snoozed through the evacuation.

Inmate/Warden: Inmate! Zach is... kind of pathetic and sneaky all at once. Unscrupulous, might be the word. He's highly mistrustful, borderline exploitative, a petty thief and a compulsive liar. He's the kind of person who'd try and cover for his mates, even if his mates had gone into a school and kicked an eleven year old to death without provocation. Emphasis on the word try, because he also has a tendency to talk way too much and gets caught out easily.

Basically, both in the human world and the mystical society known as the demi-monde, he's the kind of person who never wants to obey the rules, and he feels no obligation to change. He needs to find himself a moral compass, and then the backbone to work out how to compromise between his own morality, his naturally capricious nature, and obedience to the various powers that be in the Rivers of London universe.

Abilities/Powers:

Zach is, in his own words, the son of a "Fairy". He doesn't ever really settle on a word that he likes used to describe what he is, but he is apparently welcome among what he calls the gentry. Still, as a half-gentry, he has certain racial traits!

Sensing Vestigia
In the Rivers of London Universe, most magical beings can detect a kind of residue left by magical events, or magic users. Different beings detect it in different ways, and different magic users have certain signatures. One magician's signature might be the sound of laughter when you come into contact with one of his spells, while another's might be the taste of wine on the back of your tongue.

Zach never remarks on being able to sense vestigia, even when entering heavily warded places such as the Folly, but he does use it to navigate the sewers under London, so we know that he can detect it. My headcanon/assumption is that since Zach spends so much time transient, and flirting with the demi-monde, he's actually so accustomed to glamor and vestigia that he treats it as a kind of background noise. All of London is old and seeped in blood and magic if you go far back enough, and it's commented upon in canon that Zach thinks he's modern enough to ignore the old agreements and obligations when he can.

Limitless appetite
Zach just fucking burns food. Literally, he eats and eats and eats and still complains about his hunger pangs, as well as remaining skinny enough that his ribs are showing. This may be related to his healthy appetites for sex and intoxicants as well, but food seems to be number one on the list.

Ravenous hunger is also a trait associated with changeling folklore, where the child of a fairy is traded in for a human one by it's fae parents (And since despite knowing his father, Zach grew up in a group home, it would make a lot of sense that this is what happened to him as a child.)

Transience
It is speculated in the books that there are certain things about Zach's nature that compel him to live in a certain way. When we first meet him, he is crashing with a friend, but his clothes have the distinctive smell of someone who's been living rough. He also stays at the Folly, moves into an apartment that's being used for police surveillance, and when he gets a job (one which is paying him excellently) he camps out at work.

The inability to put down roots and settle into a permanent home is, apparently, key to his nature. This adds more weight to the idea that he's an adult changeling, since they are literally the freeloaders of the folklore world.

Obligations
So perhaps this is where the problem with being a naturally ravenous freeloader begins. There are rules in the demimonde. There are agreements and contracts and obligations that you enter into just by swimming in someone's river, crossing their path, or accepting any food or drink that you're given.

That last one is a biggie. By accepting food from someone you oblige yourself to assist them at the very least, and sign your soul away to them at most. Polite company will usually waive any obligation when buying you a drink anyway, but Zachary must have spent his life being very careful about who he took food from in order to have any free will left at all. THE BARGE WILL BE INTERESTING FOR HIM.

Glamour
Almost all of the magical beings in the Rivers of London books has some degree of glamor or another. It's for disguising yourself, controlling humans, or projecting feelings and emotions onto others.

Zach never actually does any of this, or if he does, he's projecting an air of harmlessness, and he's very very subtle about it. BASICALLY I AM JUST MENTIONING THIS IN CASE THE NEXT BOOK COMES OUT AND IT TURNS HE WAS GLAMORING ALL THE TIME.

Personality:

On first meeting, Zach comes across as being harmless. He talks freely and copiously, seems to trust people without requiring much incentive, and is generally quite a friendly and amicable guy. He wants people to like him, and wants to appear likeable in return. He sees James Gallagher - a young American student who Zach tracked down specifically to sell information too - as a genuine mate, as well as a mark.

Unfortunately, despite his general goodwill, he is less harmless than he appears. While he does talk a lot, this quality means he's just as likely to give away your secrets, or to tell you lies, as he is to compromise himself. He is unreliable, and compulsively dishonest, but he doesn't hold up as a gifted liar when the pressure is on. He will tell several different versions of the same story, trying to protect either himself or other involved parties, before giving up and coming clean.

This is another problem with being one of Zach's mates. He'll comfortably give up information on one person to protect another. To his mind, it's a kind of loyalty, to spin stories and hand out misleading information to protect whoever he considers his top priority. To those lower down the food chain, Zach can be downright treacherous. He runs many errands for many people, and has a lot of "mates" in a lot of places, but he's a capricious person, and seems to lack any concrete loyalty to anyone.

Zach also lacks any kind of respect for authority. He isn't actively offensive, but he just doesn't seem to expect people to enforce any rules against him. He placidly blabs to the police about having drugs in his house, calmly mentions to a recent victim of assault that the attacker wanted to know that they were okay, and tries to solicit a bribe out of someone who he's already heavily indebted too. He still thinks that other people should follow the rules, but he just innocently overlooks following them himself. This is a kind of casual selfishness that Zach shows often throughout the books, where he takes his own desires, needs, and feelings very seriously indeed, while being cheerily oblivious to those of other people.

This selfishness ties in with a sense of opportunism. Zach is a small time criminal, with a history of picking locks and selling drugs, without paying any mind to the ramification of these actions. He is distantly aware of the fact that he could be leading people into trouble, but he doesn't let that awareness sway him from what he sees as opportunity for himself.

His need to keep moving, and experience of living off the kindness and hospitality of others, has given Zach a contradictorily trusting nature, despite his dishonesty. He basically lets Peter Grant (the protagonist of the book series) lead him around London, cajoling him into giving up information pertaining to a case that he definitely didn't want the police knowing about. Even after seeing Peter smack someone in the face with a magic spell, he still politely trailed back to Peter's home on the promise of a warm bed for the night, without asking for any explanation.

There's a well concealed insecurity in Zach, one which shows in his relationships with others more than anything else. He's easily led in the extreme, and continually seeks the approval of people who withhold it. He's acutely aware of his position on the food chain, and in relation to the class system, and a few comments indicate that he's looked down upon by supernatural people for being half fairy. He's quite offended by being called a goblin, and is uncomfortable with being called Fae at all. He seems to find all of this quite awkward and highfalutin, and it doesn't seem to fit with his perception of himself as a common as muck kid, who just happens to have had a fairy for a dad.

So when you first meet Zach, he comes across as an easy going stoner who wants to be your mate. When you get to know him a bit better, you might realize that he's also untrustworthy, insecure, and constantly headed for trouble. What is much, much less obvious about Zach is that he is also highly observant. He knows more history of the various groups of the demi-monde than any other character has shown, picks up instantly on the relationship dynamics of those around him, and has subtly provoked characters into betraying their thoughts to him at least once. He shows these qualities only rarely, and you'll miss them if you blink, but Zach has a keen mind, which he is likely deliberately concealing.

Many of his attitudes and behaviours are learned ones, from his background growing up in group homes, and on the streets. For instance, he's highly protective of his belongings, and doesn't like people messing with them without his knowledge or permission. He is also a habitual drug user, which is extremely common for people who were raised by social services. The fact that taking drugs might put him at ease or medicate against his anxiety and unhappiness, is a completely unconscious consideration to him, secondary to the fact that doing so is easy, familiar, and totally normal.

Barge Reactions:

The first thing Zach will want to know about the Barge, is whose house is it? He'll want to know whose territory he's on, and why he can't leave. He'll be extremely uncomfortable staying in one cabin, and will solve this by trying to cajole his way into other people's rooms. Like he does in life, he'll start off by trying to be best friends with everyone, wardens and inmates alike, no matter what their background.

He'll be extremely unhappy about having a warden who knows all his business, but aside from that, probably won't be too uncomfortable on board the Barge. He'll be largely ambivalent to floods and breaches, enjoying some, and totally hating others. When he realizes that no one else is from his world, he will eat like a hungry hungry hippo and try not to tip anyone off to the fact that doing so puts him under any obligation at all.


Path to Redemption:

To get Zach interested in changing, a warden would need to make him acknowledge that his actions are meaningful. Because of his transient nature he rarely sticks around to watch the full fallout of consequences for his actions, and instead of making things right? He just stays away until the heat cools off.

He needs to be forced to actually clean up some of his messes, so he understands what he's leaving other people to deal with.

His total lack of loyalty and reliability doesn't come from a place of malice, it's just the way he expects people to treat each other. It could be beneficial for him to have someone stick by him despite the fact that he in no way deserves it, to model the behavior he needs to begin adopting.

In the long term, he'll need to figure out a decent code of moral conduct to live by, that works alongside his personal quirks, and the obligations of his society.

In the short term, he could also probably use some healthy boundaries.

It would also be really useful for him to figure out that on a purely physical level? Living a more balanced life with less drugs and partying, can make you feel more comfortable and happier. This is a relatively easy way to reinforce the idea that doing things on a whim because they'll get him out of a current moment of anxiety/discomfort/panic, comes at the cost of a more satisfying delayed gratification. It shows him a clear, recognizable benefit to developing some patience and self control.

History:

So, because the books only give us scant bits of Zach's history, I'm going to put shit that is confirmed by canon in bold. The rest, up until what happens in the books, will be headcanon/extrapolation based on what we know for a fact about him.

He grew up in care/was raised in a children's home.
Zach mentions his father several times, but never his mother. This could be for a variety of reasons, but the fact that he grew up in a children's home indicates that either she was entirely absent, or she was an unfit mother.

In the group home, he met Stephen, one of the quiet people who live in the tunnels below London. It seems likely that at this point, he could have been unaware of his true nature, and the meeting with Stephen, and recognition of each other's inhumanity, could have first introduced him to the demi-monde. Certainly since meeting Stephen, he came to act as an intermediary between the quiet people and the surface world. He brought them shopping, smoothed over problems, and he learned about their histories. He was likely a regular runaway while living in the children's home, and eventually, was either released as a teenager, or escaped into life as a rough sleeper, which continued into adulthood.

In the years that followed, he built a network of relationships both with the human world, and within the demi-monde. He's on first name terms with many of the market holders on Portobello Road, and has enough connections with the non-human community to get himself a constant stream of odd jobs and information out of them. It seems likely that during this period he did meet his father, and he seems to know more about the history of the different peoples of the demi-monde than most do.

At the start of canon, he's living with James Gallagher, an American student with ancestral family links to the Quiet People. Zach actively sought James Gallagher out when he realised he had some information that might be valuable to him, and volunteered himself as a guide.

Then canon!

Then more Canon!

Sample Journal Entry:

[Video clicks on, to reveal a skinny young man in his mid twenties. His eyes are wide and darting, and he wears an expression of deep concentration, right up until he realises he's broadcasting. Then, he becomes animated:]

Yo! I got some words for your Admiral here! I know I'm not dead, and I would remember if I'd been nicked, so you got no right hauling me in, man, no right!

[He keeps glancing off screen as he says this, as if he's expecting someone to enter his cabin at any time.]

Look, this isn't even my yard, all right? I was staying with a mate - a couple of mates, actually - so you've just gone and jacked their place out from under them, haven't you? Nicked right off with it and stuck it on your stupid boat! So where are they going to live, eh? You just made two innocent people homeless, mate, so who's the villain now?

[He puts one hand on his hip, apparently waiting for an answer. He manages to go about thirty seconds before giving an unhappy huff and putting his hand on his stomach.]

Bare starving as well. It's a fucking joke, this is.

Sample RP:
The cafeteria setup is a bit weird. At first, Zach thinks it's a control thing. That the Admiral is deliberately putting the inmates in his debt, in order to force their compliance to his will. But the inmates aren't compliant. It doesn't even seem to occur to them (even to the weird ones, like him) that they might be placed under any obligation by accepting the food.

Eventually, (after he's consumed several rounds of breakfast, lunch, and dinner) he realizes that they just don't know. Not the kitchen staff, not the diners, not any of them! And as long as none of them ever find out, he's kind of hit gold here. Unlimited free food, cooked by other people, and no one ever calling in the bill!

Having realised this, Zach has settled into a comfortable dining routine on board the Barge. First thing in the morning, he's lingering outside the refectory doors, nursing a cup of coffee a good ten minutes before any food is being served. Barefoot, and dressed only in a faded nirvana tee shirt, and boxer shorts, he practically bounds in towards the serving barrier when the doors open.

He scans the morning's offerings, and is about to begin trying to sweet talk the server into giving him an unrealistically hefty portion, when he realises he's being watched.

"Yo, Riddick!" He shoots the supervisor his biggest, most likeable grin, "You make any extra for me today?"

Zach keeps his smile fixed, and counts the kitchen staff. They must never know.

Special Notes: I'd be really interested to play out Zachs sensing 'vestigia', or the magical residue of people on the Barge. If accepted, I'd put up a permissions post for this.